Many people confuse sustainability consulting with green marketing – beautifully branded, sleek consumer products designed with unbleached, post-consumer recycled paper products and lots of leafy logos – or with strategic sustainability communications – guiding employees or green teams toward more sustainable behavioral changes through values training and green workplace programs and policies.
Sustainability consulting includes both of those elements at times, but most of the heavy lifting in sustainability consulting entails using complicated datasets to analyze and quantify activities, policies, programs, and processes that contribute to the environmental and social impacts of a product or organization.
Essentially, a lot of math. A lot of data. And a lot of analysis. And then a lot of strategic communications.
If you’re still with us, and you still think you’re stoked about a career in sustainability, how are you going to land the dream job?
- Get experience in sustainability through internships or fellowships
- Ensure you understand the work through finding and working with a mentor in the field
- Provide work samples
- Knock the interview out of the park
The interview is critical
Taking your interview skills to the next level means demonstrating your ability to learn while doing.
By using the 1956 research of Benjamin Bloom to highlight your higher cognitive thinking. This article helps explain how its done, but essentially – whether looking for a new client or a new job – going beyond storytelling and detailing your experiences based on your abilities to analyze, synthesize, evaluation and adjust course is going to put you ahead of the pack.